Internet-enabled wireless surveillance cameras are widely used today in a variety of settings for monitoring behavior, activity and other dynamic information. Some popular uses of surveillance systems include monitoring premises and public spaces for security and potential threats, monitoring the flow of vehicle traffic for traffic management, and monitoring the flow of people at retail establishments for retail analytics. Wireless surveillance cameras are closed-circuit television cameras that wirelessly transmit video signals from one or more cameras to a wireless receiver. Once uploaded to the receiver, the video may be reviewed and analyzed, for example by a human operator.
Conventional wireless surveillance cameras are ‘dumb’ devices, in that they simply capture video and wirelessly upload the video to the receiver. However, given the increasing use of wireless surveillance systems, the Terabytes of raw video which are often uploaded can easily surpass the bandwidth capacity of the wireless network, resulting in bottlenecks and delays. Additionally, the large amount of uploaded video in a video surveillance system presents both a data storage issue and a significant data analysis and management problem.